just got an original LaCie 5big (5 - 2TB Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 drives) that a coworker reformatted. I tried the windows directions using the .img file and dd'ing the drives... I also noted the ending heads/sectors remark and am not sure what to put... within DiskGenius V3.2.1211 off the Hiren's CD... and in looking at the ending head/sector, it doesn't make sense, my beginning ones are showing high numbers almost like counting backwards, so not sure what it should be... I've tried this a couple of times and like everyone else before, just get the all red in back and fast blinking red in front... any help would be appreciated...

First time post but have been checking in and out of here for a time now. A long post so bear with me... I shall explain everything I've done as I don't want you all to think I haven't tried!!!

I have had a 5Big (v1) from new and it worked (mechanically) very well but firmware updates were an issue and would seldom stick and LaCie's customer service left a lot to be desired - apparently it's serial number didn't exist. That's by the by however... it all happened at once, some time ago now, the RAID crashed quite spectacularly and then the PSU gave out. Initially I thought I would give up on it but considering the price of the 5Big I bought a new PSU from LaCie (How much???). I then discovered that my 5Big had come fitted with some rather flaky (quite literally it turns out) HDDs from Seagate and the one I opened - well, you'd have thought I'd tipped gravel in while it was spinning!

I had one working disk left which would boot the LaCie but it had SMART errors galore so I kept it coddled until I could afford five new disks and then come on here and do some magic.

Alas the last original disk didn't survive imaging and gave up shortly after starting it up again so that could not be relied upon so I have tried everything that is suggested in this thread and it still wont start!!!

I have tried (numerous times) formatting the disks and adding each partition manually using fdisk, parted and even the terminal in Mac OSX but nothing has worked. I have tried using the disk image that some of you have had success with but nothing seems to work. I either get a slowly pulsing blue light at the front and solid blue lights at the back, a slowly pulsing blue light at the front and flickering blue lights of various patterns and formations at the back (sometimes disks 1, 3 and 5 and other times 2 and 4) and then I just get the all out panicky red lights both front and back either solid, flickering or pulsing or any other combination it can come up with! Never, ever, do I get a solid blue light at the front and I never get any access to the web interface.

I have come across several issues along the way that I wonder if any of you can help with along with getting my nice new shiny disks into a working RAID 5...

1. Can anyone explain (and I might have the wrong end of the stick here) why the "LaCieFirstBootLaCie" string starts at offset 1536? The notes from the lib file say that it should be at the start of the third sector which surely would be after the first 1024 bytes. I have opened the MBR file from the 2Big2 suggested by Mijzelf in a hex editor and sure enough there it sits at 1536 but was that from a disk dump? I have set up my disks as suggested and the dump reads the same but I wonder if this might be a problem some people are having.

2. When following FlorenceNightingale's post (very comprehensive and easy to follow it is too), I keep getting lots of complaints from mdadm that the sectors are not aligned - would this cause a problem? I have read (extensively, believe me) about the new 4k Advanced format drives and I can see where the alignment warning come from so my question, do I stick with the suggested start and end sectors or should I realigned them - in other words does the LaCie bootloader expect the partitions to be in a particular place or does it read the MBR partition table and get the info from there?

3. Can someone please clarify the correct reset procedure for the 5Big - both here and LaCie's own info give two different procedures. Briefly, one is hold button and turn on ---> starts to flicker red ---> stops flickering ---> remove finger ---> starts to flicker blue ---> stops flickering --->remove finger. The other (very long-winded option) has lots of flickering changing of colours and on'ing and off'ing of the finger on the front button and includes holding for 40 seconds after switching on (but there is never a suggestion of shake it all about and doing the Okey Cokey boringly). Suffice to say only one of these ever works for me and that is the former - works in the sense that the 5Big responds as it should - the latter just never causes any flickering that follows what should happen. Does it depend on the firmware version???

Can anyone offer any help with this as otherwise I have 5 disks that I have no use for... I bought 2tb disks because of the size limitation of the LaCie but if I can't use them I would have bought a larger size for other things - 2tb is getting a bit bit dinky nowadays... funny considering I have a nearly 20 year old 30GB drive of the IDE kind in a vintage PowerMac G4 that just keeps on going! Ay, they don't make em like they used to!

I had considered that and have been to plugout.net and have been impressed but 1. my skills do not extend to telnet and serial connections (the Linux was enough of a struggle tbh because of all the command line stuff) and 2. I don't have and don't need windows and I am not paying through the nose for it just to revive the LaCie as nice as that would be.

I shall therefore keep your suggestion in reserve until such time as I fail completely with the original firmware, run out of patience and/or full RAID functionality becomes GUI controlled with your firmware.

I had considered that and have been to plugout.net and have been impressed but 1. my skills do not extend to telnet and serial connections (the Linux was enough of a struggle tbh because of all the command line stuff) and 2. I don't have and don't need windows and I am not paying through the nose for it just to revive the LaCie as nice as that would be.

I shall therefore keep your suggestion in reserve until such time as I fail completely with the original firmware, run out of patience and/or full RAID functionality becomes GUI controlled with your firmware.

Thanks again

there is no knowledge required for serail connection (we don't use it) and telnet is just a command window in which you will type linux commands.
However if you don't have windows then you could try the manual setup. I did not make a console yet for Linux as not many users use linux as operation system.
It is up to you, I am fine with whatever you decide

i have a 5big v2 that doesn't work anymore.
I tested each drive individually and one was faulty so we changed it with the same model.
I formatted all five 2to seagate barracuda drives with the 2008221.IMG provided here.
I have all lights blue but can't see the admin page neither as a webpage (http://lacie-5big.local) nor in lacie network assistant (no ethernet disk available).
Disks sectors were 80 / 63 so i changed to 254 / 63 but still no luck.